But no, it's actually a good thing for the Democratic party to cater to "moderate" republicans. No, the party definitely isn't moving to the right!
THE MOST PROGRESSIVE PLATFORM SINCE FDR
Catering to the moderate Republicans while at the same time getting angry that the left won't move to the right along with them. Brilliant strategy.
They don't even say most progressive since FDR, or LBJ, or anybody. They say most progressive eVeRrR!!!!1!. LBJ was a genocide enabling war criminal who acted as a complete scourge on all of South-East Asia, but domestically, the Civil Rights Act + The Voting Rights Act + trying to end poverty in the US as we know it is more progressive than anything that has ever crossed Joe's fucking mind, let alone what he actually promises, and don't even fucking talk about what the corporations and Republicans are gonna manage to negotiate him down to (if he gets in). It's incredibly annoying but also completely expected that, understanding that the younguns don't believe in meaningless platitudes nearly as much as they did in 2008 (because they want actual policy and positions after getting duped the last time), instead of just giving the kiddos policies and positions that people are actually excited to vote on, the party would rather gaslight its voters into thinking that Joe is the best thing that has ever been reasonably possible to elect in this country.
calling people LARPers while telling people to vote for Biden
Yeah, ok.
Oh look, it's you. Advocating voting for Biden.
Voting Biden would humiliate white supremacists, they would stop having their racist and neocon rhetoric validated from the very top. That alone is already a massive benefit.
People here aren't voting for Trump. Unless you conflate any vote other than Biden (or not voting) with a vote for Trump. I'm not going to tell you who to vote for, but please, for everyone's sake, stop arguing that voting for Biden is going to do anything to materially help the working class.
No one is saying to not attack Trump. Holy shit, fuck off back to /r/politics if you can't understand the difference between praising Trump and criticizing Biden.
It's clear that the user you're quoting is using "on paper" to look at the situation from the perspective of someone who only looks at the name on their letter with the stimulus.
people are going to look at Trump and say yeah this guy gave me money versus your whole lotta nothing you’re promising me
Oh look, they even clarified that they don't personally believe that Trump is helping, but that they believe many in middle America will see it that way. Yet here you are, still willfully misunderstanding what they are saying and deliberately misrepresenting it as a defense of Trump.
This is not backed by any facts, it’s literal propaganda.
That doesn't matter. Americans are trying to tell you, the people here are not able to discern what is propoganda and what is real. Trump voters especially are not educated and don't care about actual facts. We're saying the people who vote for him are doing it for that reason because the media hides shit like tax breaks that people wouldn't like. Or they just have brainworms and don't care.
I'm going to laugh when Trump, in a last ditch effort to maintain his presidency, calls for M4A and the democrats come out hard against it, handing him his second term.
Please let it be the final nail in the vampire, this fucking cycle is too boring and stupid, I can't stand two more months of this.
This isn't unheard of in MN. It's how they're able to hold their majority in things like the state house. Just remember that political parties in the US aren't a real thing compared to other countries and this stuff eventually makes sense.
There's a congressman in MN that's a democrat, but is a republican in terms of how they vote and a bunch of other stuff along those lines but they're a dem because they contributing to Pelosis majority. It's the most republican leaning district with a Dem rep in the country and has been for decades.
Rural communities want progressive policies as they relate to things like healthcare, wages, and pensions but side with Republicans on culture war issues (guns, abortion, policing), and on the environment (a lot of rural areas only have an economy because of things that are environmentally destructive). So in some states they vote for populist republicans and in others they vote for very right wing democrats.
These six mayor's represent a population of 25k, whereas Duluth, Grand Rapids, and the North shore population are the majority of the people living up there. The MN GOP likely doesn't even fund candidates for these small offices, they focus on central Minnesota where I live.
I think my go-to reply to people who say this is going to be **whom * rom now on.
You know Biden doesn't hold public office right now, right? Biden is shit but the Trump administration has passed a single $1200 stimulus payout in fucking six months. You're dull if you think Trump will pay out anymore if he wins re-election.
I don't like saying this, because I absolutely hate Trump, but it's not unreasonable to believe he did more for the white working class of the Midwest and other small towns than Biden has in his entire career. Biden had long been one of the strongest champions for neoliberalism during his time in the Senate, pushing for all sorts of deregulation, free trade, outsourcing, and so on.
This isn't to say Trump did a lot, or really much of anything outside of rhetoric, but Trump (as well as Sanders in 2016) reset the majority DC beltway position which was deeply pro free trade and pro outsourcing prior and now both parties have completely moved away from that.
I absolutely understand why white working class voters in small towns throughout the country would support Trump over Biden, even though historically these people were all democrats that only screwed themselves over by voting for people like Bill Clinton and Obama.
Biden really needs to get out there and start talking about policy or he's going to lose. His written (which who knows what you can trust but still) platform does support substantial alterglobalization tactics that go far beyond what Trump would do to rebuild the American manufacturing base.
If you're going to say this kind of shit you need to point to specific policies and not be intentionally vague. And the policies you point to need to overcome the fact that the USMCA was at best a modest improvement over a shit trade deal, block granting Medicaid, the 2018 tax cuts which overwhelmingly benefited the very rich, removed a rule guaranteeing overtime pay to millions of workers, repealed a rule mandating that retirement investment advisers prioritize the worker's interest over their own, reduced oversight on payday lenders, the government shut down that left workers unpaid for weeks, being vocal about his intention to repeal ACA (which as shit as it is many people support it and rely on it). Just because Biden is bad and Trump tells his base he's helping them doesn't make it true at all, and why would he? He has no fucking incentive to help people he has no class interest with when he can whip their votes with culture war shit.
Look I think Trump is a total fraud, his policies have not actually done anything for these people. Trump isn't helping anyone. This is about how he makes people feel as if he was helping them.
But rhetorically, he has a strength over Biden in this area. Most voters don't pay attention to facts, they just pay attention to what the news has been telling them right around the time they're about to vote.
Trump can act like he's bringing the jobs back in a way Biden hasn't been (even though Bidens written platform actually has ways that would being back manufacturing jobs and Trump doesn't even have a platform). It's that Biden has a history of supporting outsourcing that Trump doesn't have rhetorically.
If you're going to argue optics and rhetoric then argue optics and rhetoric. What you said was "it’s not unreasonable to believe he did more for the white working class of the Midwest and other small towns than Biden has in his entire career." You didn't say certain people might think he's done more for the working class you said that he might have actually done more for the working class which is just absolutely not true. Just because Biden is also bad doesn't mean Trump is somehow less bad.
My comment isn't about him materially doing more and if it came across that way that was wrong. I am only talking about how people are able to convince themselves that he's done more for them than Biden.
The fact that Joe Biden is no longer supporting free trade after supporting it for 40 years of his career is something Trump can point to and say, hey this is something I've actually done. Changing the DC consensus on free trade is certainly something a group of concerned voters could use as reasoning for why they think he's been better than Trump.
Maybe it's just editorializing by journalists, but I've seen a number of stories and segments over the past few weeks that find some former Obama voters in small town pennsylvania and michigan who say this sort of thing. That they think Trump is better for them because of his positions around trade and less so around environmental regulation.
I'm not talking about what a leftist would believe, I'm talking about a random swing voter, and socialists are doing themselves a disservice if they deny why Trump is popular to a particular group of people beyond just his fascist rhetoric.
Fascism has popularity beyond for just the purposes of racism, the way fascists coopt leftist language has been a key part of their success wherever they've popped up.
There are people who vote in every election, and they always view it as a choice between two evils. A subset of white small town working class voters will decide Trump is that lesser evil on the basis of trade and how he won't get rid of their jobs due to environmental regulation. Do I agree with that, no, but there is a valid argument there, and it was a primary reason why Bernie was a stronger candidate against Trump than Biden, and especially Hillary in 2016.
Fascism isn't defeated by just saying it's bad, you need to understand the very real logic for how people feel globalization hurt their communities, and present a solution centered around how exactly you plan on bringing jobs back to their communities (a green new deal is a fantastic opportunity to help these places and drag them back to the left).
i love it when liberals pull the "you're not a leftist" card thinking their opinion means anything
and again, i'm not american
Contrary to you, I have faced a US backed coup in my country.
doubt it, considering you are hardcore shilling for a man who has promised to keep pushing for "regime change"
Log off and do something productive with your life
i've done more than you ever have
Shilling for trump is about the worst you can possibly do as a human being.
yeah, that's definitely what i'm doing
not american, lib
not a trump shill, lib
hope america dies, libdoubt it. that record will be broken again by biden, that's what yank presidents do
I seriously don't understand how someone who thinks of themselves as some sort of socialist is able to unironically make an argument that is completely detached from materialism.
You can argue that regardless of material concern these people still need to be faught, and I'd mostly agree with you that all legitimate Trump supporters do need to be faught. The difference is that not all Trump voters are Trump supporters. Elections are won on the margins, and marginal Trump voters aren't the same has his deeply fascist base.
You don't think that Trump's rhetoric is emboldening people like Kyle Rittenhouse who are fucking murdering our comrades in the streets?
That shit doesn't matter. Rittenhouse is an obvious waste of skin who ought to be shipped off to the bottom of the ocean, but incidents like this are absolutely insignificant in any larger way.
I'm not shilling for Trump, you lib, he's obviously bad but l-fucking-mao if you think electing Biden is going to remotely help end the American civil religion.
You have to be extremely white and lib to think that electing Biden will make the racists go away, or make them less explicit. There's already smoke about viewing any Trump loss as indicative of the establishment conspiring against him. You really believe that the fanatical nature informing those types of views is going to get less explicit somehow? Bizarre take.
Also, these aren't neocons. The neocons are over at the Lincoln Project, doing their own little psyop in order to gain relevancy again. These are full blown fascists forming militias, and gunning down civilians. You're out of your fucking mind if you think this is going away.
I was the OP you replied to and I still agree with most of this, you just need to recognize why rural white people feel the way they do.
Base your analysis in materialism rather than the idea that people are just inherently racist.
I'm not talking about right wing ideologues holy shit, not every Trump voter from 2016 was a hardcore supporter. That's like saying every Bernie supporter was a far off socialist, when we know that wasn't the case.
The basis for this conversation is that there are white working class people who felt Trump was doing more for them than Biden. It has absolutely nothing to do with any of this other stuff you're talking about, these people are single issue bring the jobs back voters that supported democrats for decades before voting for Trump. I'm talking about the people who voted for Obama twice, they probably voted for Ross Perot in the 90s because of his free trade position.
These people probably haven't thought about foreign policy much and when they do it was against things like the Iraq war (another rhetorical thing Trump can hold over Bidens head).
Please take a step back from your high horse and understand why fascism is rising in our country, the reasons are material.
